Baby Steps
by Shwoo
Summary: Finn tries to be nice to his new ice wizard roommate.


Finn climbed down the ladder from his room to find the Ice King lounging on the couch, happily squinting at a book. He was lying on his back, with one leg in the air and his tunic half hitched up.

And Finn thought he'd seen too much of the Ice King's underwear back when things were normal. At least he was being quiet, for once. Finn glanced out the window at the Ice Kingdom, which seemed as cold and unfriendly as it always had, and wondered how much longer the Ice King would need to stay.

He was about to walk by, but he hesitated. It wasn't really the Ice King's fault he was so... Ice King. And it was Finn's fault that he'd lost his home. Finn and his stupid lady-feelings.

"Hey," he said haltingly. "Ice King. What are you reading?"

It wasn't one of Finn or Jake's books. It looked like one of the thick books the Ice King had salvaged from his castle. Ice King had a lot of books, although he rarely seemed to read them. He'd had more books before Finn had tricked Flame Princess into melting his house.

The Ice King looked up, smiling. "Oh, hey Finn. It's about the historical context of the myths of the ancient Egyptians." He turned the book around so that Finn could see the pages.

There was a lot of small text arranged into four columns, and one sepia-toned picture of an animal headed person standing awkwardly below some symbols.

"Fascinating, isn't it?" said Ice King, without a hint of sarcasm.

"Uh..." said Finn. "Sure." Ancient Egyptian myths... He'd read about them too, in comics. "Mummies walking around strangling guys and junk. Ancient Egypt is, uh, great." He didn't care about their historical context, though. Whatever that was, exactly. Sounded like nerd stuff.

The Ice King beamed. "Ooh, there's way more to ancient Egyptian mythology than horror movies." He sat up and patted the cushion next to him. "Hey. Do you know _why_ they mummified their dead?"

Finn remained standing. "To guard their super-dangerous tombs filled with mega-valuable treasure?" He didn't really want to get trapped into a long talk with the Ice King, but he also didn't have much else better to do today. Nobody seemed to need any help, and Jake was busy trying to set the world record for most vivid dreams in the space of twenty-four hours. Finn might as well stick around and listen to the old sociopath.

"Wrong!" said the Ice King gleefully. "They did it because they thought it was the only way to preserve the identity of the dead guy! You know, so they could brave the dangerous of the underworld and get their soul weighed by the god of the dead."

"Oh. Cool," said Finn, still standing awkwardly. This was kind of interesting, and the Ice King hadn't playfully tried to tackle him or burst into tears yet, which was a good sign. "Did everyone have to turn into a mummy, or just the Egyptians?" He didn't know if he could pass the soul-weighing anymore.

"Oh, they thought foreigners existed to throw the world into chaos," said the Ice King. "And at first they though only the pharaoh even had a soul! That's why you gotta study their myths in context. They existed for a long, crazy long time. Did you know that Cleopatra lived closer to the present day than when the Great Pyramid was built?" He patted the cushion again.

Reluctantly, Finn sat down. "You sure know a lot about this, Ice King." He didn't want to say how surprised he was about it. Depending on how lucid he was today, the Ice King might take it as an insult, and Finn had caused him enough grief he didn't deserve.

"Oh yeah, I've always been fascinated by ancient superstitions," said the Ice King. "People used to believe some _weird_ things."

Finn thought the ancient Egyptian burial customs sounded quite sensible, if mummifying people was the only way to get them to the underworld. "You don't believe in superstition, Ice King? Isn't it just another word for magic and that jazz?" The ancient Egyptians had lived before the Great Mushroom War, though. There'd been less magic back then, or something. Right?

"Magic?" the Ice King snorted. "Magic is even more fake than-" He glanced at his hands. "Wait. Oh yeah. Magic is _real_. What was I thinking?"

Finn didn't know. At least the Ice King was well-groomed and wearing a clean tunic. It must have been a good day for him.

"You wanna talk about mythology some more?" said the Ice King, after a minute or two of silence. "I could tell you what I was working on!"

"You were... working on something?" said Finn. Just when he thought he couldn't feel any more guilty for what he'd done to the Ice King. And Flame Princess.

"Yeah!" said the Ice King. He frowned. "I... can't remember why I stopped. It must have been important, or... I know! I took a break to focus on my love life. Yeah. That's what happened."

"Huh," said Finn. He couldn't see the Ice King researching anything, but maybe... "Why don't you go back to it?" A research-obsessed Ice King was preferable to a princess-kidnapping one, he hoped.

The Ice King leaned back in his seat. "Yeah, maybe... Once I'm happily married, of course." He clasped his hands. "Married to the princess of my dreams..."

It had been worth a try. "What were you working on, Ice King?"

"Ooh!" The Ice King jumped up from the couch and went into the curtained off section of the room that he slept in. "You're gonna love this, Finn." He dug into one of his cardboard boxes, throwing the books inside all over the floor. "Notes... Notes..." He upended the box, and a stack of printer paper fell out. "Aha, here you are! I printed these out when... when I uh..." He stared at the ceiling with a frown. "Well, I printed them out, that's for sure."

Finn couldn't tell if he was lying or just confused.

"I had a big lead on an ancient civilisation from the depths of the mists of the far reaches of time itself!" The Ice King made a wooshing noise through his teeth and gave Finn the paper.

The top of the first page read _a cypher of the first rather than a language in its own right. Despite my previous statement, I have met with Dr B, and this language shares **no** significant features with Indo-Iranian languages, nor with any Indo-European languages at all. Turkic has likewise been ruled out, and research into other families is_

Finn stopped reading because he felt like his head was filling up with fluff. "What's all this junk about?"

"Huh?" The Ice King looked over Finn's shoulder. "I dunno, secret codes? What do I look like, a linguist?"

"Did you even write this?" said Finn. It was written in science speak, like the kind Princess Bubblegum used in her papers.

"Yes!" said the Ice King indignantly. "It's called _professionalism_, Finn. Man, I let this sit for way too long. I'm onto something big!" He dropped the papers on the couch and spread them out. "Oh, look at this!"

He picked up a page covered in black pen in the Ice King's handwriting, partially obscuring the typed writing. Not all of it was legible, but there was a clear column of "no"s going down the page. Near the bottom, the printed text had been scribbled out and the word "wrong!" had been written next to it.

"I was in such a frenzy of archaeological inspiration I didn't finish what I was saying!" said the Ice King. He turned the paper upside down. "Wait. Maybe they're song lyrics...? Pay attention, Finn, this is where genius comes from."

Finn caught a glimpse of something that seemed strangely familiar. "Hey, lemme see that a second." He took the paper, turned it right side up, and tried to locate the word he'd seen. "There..." Between a crossing out and the words "stupid stupid stupid" was half a legible sentence: 'usands of miles away in northern Scandina'.

Northern Scan... something. Why did that sound so familiar? He'd heard someone say it, in a quiet voice. Someone who sounded a bit like... "Ice King, how long ago did you stop working on this?"

The Ice King furrowd his brow. "I dunno. A couple months? Maybe a year? Eh, probably not that long." He picked up another piece of paper and mumbled as he read it to himself.

Finn looked at the scribbling again. He thought he understood why it was there now. "I think it coulda been longer. A lot longer."

"You... You think so?" said the Ice King, beginning to sound worried. He raised the paper he was reading to his face and sniffed it. "Smells kinda old..."

"Like, a thousand years old?" said Finn. He was guessing, but he thought the Ice King might have been born even before the Mushroom War. Maybe the reason he knew so much about ancient Egypt was from personal experience.

"A... thousand years," said the Ice King slowly. He looked from Finn to the paper and back again.

He was really getting it for once! Maybe some good could come of the loss of his kingdom after all.

"I abandoned my research for a _thousand years_?" the Ice King yelled. He crumpled the paper in his hand and ran into his room, sobbing loudly. "I'm a failure at love and... and at..." He closed the curtain and dissolved into muffled crying.

"Uh..." said Finn. "Ice King? You... you okay?"

"Go away!" said the Ice King.

Finn looked through the papers he'd left behind, but even the ones that hadn't been scribbled over didn't really make sense to him. Maybe he could ask Princess Bubblegum for help, if she didn't mind touching something the Ice King had sniffed. He just wanted to be able to understand the Ice King better.

Jake came down the stairs, non-magically stretching his arms above his head.

"Jake!" said Finn, putting down the paper with relief. "You're awake!"

Jake yawned. "BMO set his timer for 3pm today instead of 9pm tomorrow." He went into the kitchen and started making a sandwich. "I'm going back in once I'm all stocked up on sleep food." He glanced at the curtain, where the Ice King was still sobbing audibly, and rolled his eyes.

Finn followed Jake into the kitchen and lowered his voice. "Jake. I think I just saw Simon." It was hard to remember that the Ice King hadn't always been a pathetic, obnoxious stalker.

Once he'd been a human. Like Finn.

Jake turned to him, smiling. "No way! I thought he lived in the eastern wastes nowadays!"

For a second, Finn didn't know what he was talking about. "No, not the bug, I mean..." Finn motioned in the direction of the quiet crying.

Jake twisted his head around, then looked at Finn. "The Ice King? Finn, nobody calls him that anymore."

"It's his real name!" said Finn. "He showed me these notes and-"

"Yeah, that's great. I'm going back to bed," said Jake, stretching around Finn with his sandwich half-finished.

"Okay," Finn called. "Good luck!"

He jiggled the papers in his hands and sighed.


End file.
